


Darkness

by UnwrittenCurse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark, Death Eaters, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Infertility, Minor Character Death, Pregnancy, Pureblood Culture, Wizarding Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 12:51:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6470605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnwrittenCurse/pseuds/UnwrittenCurse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nadia Rowle struggles with infertility and discovers that her husband, Thorfinn, is a monster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkness

When she thinks of being a mother, she thinks of a future self. Twenty eight, thirty, thirty three. She thinks of laugh lines and streaks of gray. She thinks of her mother. 

But at twenty one, her skin is firm and her home is littered with laundry. The cats nip at her ankles when their bowl runs dry and the painting from her uncle—his wedding present, now eight weeks forgotten—sits dusty on the dining room floor. The piano plunks like a rusty door hinge. 

She makes lists of all the things she wants and he indulges her. He takes her to Africa overnight. He buys her expensive wine and catches her as she pirouettes into his arms. But when she tells him she wants a baby, he says not yet and she nods because she is a child and the laundry sits in heaps on the bedroom floor.

♦

First there are flowers, his lips blooming at the tip of her nose as she stands barefoot in the kitchen, fiddling with her wedding band. Then, falling naked onto an unmade bed, tenderness even in the spaces between words. He makes promises with his fingers against the hollow of her stomach.

But soon enough, there is pain. Chapped lips. Tramping clots of dirt through the kitchen. His lovemaking rushed, insincere. He comes home smelling like stale breath, like earth and fermented things, and some nights he doesn’t come home at all.

♦

She loves the feeling of silk sheets, of slipping into a bed and feeling nothing—no friction, no pull and tug. When the lights go out and the curtains draw, she sleeps like a queen and wants for nothing. And in the mornings she wakes, sliding from the mattress and tiptoeing out onto the terrace as the drunken haze of dawn descends, bleeding color onto the gardens, the rolling hills of the manor. Hot tea waits for her. She sits and sips and feels invisible in the best way. 

These are happinesses money can buy. These are the moments she is grateful for her title. But she is under no illusions. She knows what is expected of a pureblood wife and heiress. 

_Silence._

♦

Yes, she says. _Yes yes yes_ when he asks if she’s taken the potion. She kisses him into forgetting and they crash into bed, almost like those first weeks, like their honeymoon when his eyes lingered and he laughed with abandon.

_Yes._

She wants him, wants _this_ , every inch of her body wanting, craving motherhood.

Later, she imagines cells dividing. She imagines microscopic fireworks against the blood-rich walls of her womb.

♦

It’s lonely when he’s gone. Though his fingers hurt, now, when they grip her arms—though they leave fingerprint bruises, round and purple—she _misses_ him. Sometimes it’s just hours but sometimes it’s days or weeks and so she begins folding laundry in the quiet hours of night. The lavender breath of detergent calms her. So does the folding, the neatness of the squares of clothing in piles on the bed.

She reads, too. Poetry mostly. She sits in a cocoon of blankets and reads Keats and Dickinson, and _This is the hour of lead_ speaks to her in ways she doesn’t understand.

♦

He tells stories of the Death Eaters and she pretends not to listen. She pretends that her dreams aren’t dripping with blood. But when he kisses her, she tastes it.

♦

She’s in a hospital gown, the thin paper veil crinkling underneath her as she wriggles. The Healer stands in profile. He’s holding the clipboard so tightly his skin is pulled taut. She follows the bones in his hands to his knuckles to the wood of the clipboard to her test results.

The diagnosis sounds like a made-up word, but the Healer says it with such gravity that the laugh dies in her throat. What it means, he says, is infertility.

She considers crying. It would make sense to cry, in a moment like this, when impossibility becomes a possibility and her womb is hollow like the first year of their marriage. But she smiles at the Healer and says _thanks_. And when the Healer asks if her husband will come next time, she lies. She says _thanks_. She dresses, then leaves. 

He’s not home when she returns with a crack.

♦

He finds the bottle under her pillow and the label betrays her.

To her surprise, there is no yelling. Instead, his eyes go dark and he demands she stop dwelling. As if childlessness is like a bee sting, like a hangnail or an O.W.L. An inconvenience.

She almost doesn’t, but she asks if he’ll come to Mungo’s with her. She has an appointment next week. They’d like to run tests on him, too. They’d like to be thorough. She’ll stop dwelling, she says, after the tests. After they’re thorough.

Perhaps to appease her or perhaps to prove he is a man, he agrees. He writes the date on his palm and kisses her forehead, and she pretends, in this moment, that she married him for love. 

That is what she will tell their child. 

♦

She opens the door and her cousin enters, arms laden with brown paper bags. Inside, wine. Chocolate. Cigarettes. She refuses the latter and accepts a kiss on the cheek. She thanks her cousin for coming. She hopes she’ll stay the night.

Later, they’re sitting cross-legged in front of the fire in the great room, cheeks flushed. Her legs buzz with the feeling of sleep but she can’t move because everything in this moment is perfect. They tell stories. They laugh in their controlled way until the wine makes them giddy and their hair is untied. Their glasses filling and refilling, their smiles burning their cheeks, they promise each other forever in the way sisters do. 

She wonders if their blood relation knits them closer than a promise ever could.

When the sun sleeps, so do they—curled up on couches, snoring, the cats coiled against their feet. Her cousin stays for three more nights and by the morning of the fourth day, she forgets that she’s defective.

♦

She waits on the exam table. He’s twenty minutes late when the Healer says they need the room for the next patient. She begs for just ten more minutes, which are granted, but he still isn’t there and she’s sent home in tears.

He’s barely through the door when she confronts him. She tells him how she waited and waited and made the doctors wait, too. Tears snake down her face. She knows she’s violated boundaries when a growl rumbles in his throat and he grabs her firmly by the waist. He pulls her close. His unshaven cheek burns her skin. 

He has forgotten nothing, he says, _don’t lie_. He wouldn’t agree to fertility treatment. She’s not ready to be a mother, he says. _Not yet. Maybe never._

She crumples to the floor, a dying flower. He leaves her there. She’s never felt so alone, not even when he’s gone for weeks and all she has are the cats twisting their tails around her shins. Right now, beaten on the hardwood floor, is the first time she considers divorce. She sets it in her mind and watches it turn, admiring it with the cool distance of a museum patron. She wonders how it will fit, how it will feel.

Then she imagines her empty, broken womb, curved like a kidney bean. Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe her sins are too great.

But sainthood is not part of her design. So she’ll stay. 

♦

The morning paper finds her red-eyed and wan. This is the closest she comes to war—reading stories of atrocity. She doesn’t agree with violence, doesn’t think it’s warranted, especially in the name of blood status. After all, birth is not a choice but an occasion. A blip in history.

Page one of the _Prophet_ says _Wanted_ in black and white. It’s The Boy Who Lived, looking heavy-eyed and vacant, and in some secret part of her dwells the prayer that he’ll live again. What this means for her husband, she doesn’t know.

♦

She feels his presence as they lay in bed. Even turned away, with the lights off, in the early hours of morning. She curls away from it, yet there it is, like a second skin or a noose. 

She hates him, she thinks. She’s never _hated_ but this must be what it’s like—this hot, breathless urge to kick, hit, throw up. She hates him and is suddenly glad that her body refuses to mother, because maybe darkness is genetic. 

But then a week passes and she’s late. Nausea tugs at the pit of her stomach. She’s afraid, shaking even, as she takes the test—a Muggle 1£ test from the pharmacy, a magic unto itself. After two and a half years, she expects one pink line and one non-line. She expects to squint at the blank window and then hide it in the trash. But there are two. And everything changes.

For six days, she stays silent. She takes another test, and another, and the lines get progressively darker. On the seventh day, she stands before the bathroom mirror, looks herself in the eye, and says it. _Pregnant._ She watches her lips shape the word and surprises herself by not crying.

When she tells him, she tells him hypothetically. _What if._ And he doesn’t even look at her, doesn’t even blink, when he says he’d take care of it.

This time, she is sick. She runs to the bathroom and gags and gags until her eyes burn with tears.

♦

He’s gone for three weeks. In his absence, she cringes at the slightest sound and cries into the quiet. In his absence, her heart swells to hold the new life growing in her womb. 

♦

There are knocks at the door—frantic knocks, pounding—and voices. Her hands go instinctively to her stomach. She contemplates fleeing.

Before she can react, the door is wrenched open with a sickening crunch. Snowflakes litter the entranceway and the scent of pine is sharp. Her muscles melt to hot wax at her father’s round, familiar face. Just behind him, her uncle, bearded and solemn. She almost cries in relief.

Then her father is hugging her, holding her in a way he hasn’t for many years now, not since she was small enough to sit on his knee. She’s crying and he’s crying and she can’t help the pain that slides behind her heart, even in the joy of this moment. He’s not here to visit. This she knows. No. Something has happened.

As it turns out, she’s right. _He’s dead_ , she hears, he died a hero. Hundreds, thousands are dead. It happened, he says. It’s over. 

It’s all over.

In the swell of a heartbeat, she’s swept off to live with her uncle. The manor abandoned, the House Elves distributed among the remaining family, inheritance delivered, funerals planned. She wears black for months and her stomach grows and grows.

She stays quiet, doesn’t utter a word, when the Ministry runs its investigations. She’s not at fault, her uncle says, she’s not stained by the sins of her husband. And she’s expecting— _look_. You can’t expect a widow to testify against the deceased father of her unborn. 

So she’s left alone. She’s invisible again, in the way she likes. In the way she needs. For though she wears black, she does not mourn.

♦

Six months later, her daughter is born. She names her Soleil, _sun_ —the brightest light in the sky.


End file.
